I'm still waiting to be cast in an XXX Hackers spoof, where copying a garbage file sends the female lead on a dirty, dirty quest to get out of trouble with the sleazy fat ugly cops that pursue her.
Might as well spoof Takedown as well, where a fugitive hacker leads his asian arch nemesis on a cross-country chase through every brothel in the USA, all over a dick-length argument. They finally settle their feud in a stomach-churning scene where they both anally violate a journalist named John Warkoff.
Oh come on! When have you ever seen pr0n with a good story ?
(raises hand) Guilty. I had my own Dos-clone OS and despite my diligence, I still managed to hard-code some values in a few rarely-used routines. Luckily they were read-only operations but it was certainly frustrating to chase down every occurrence of "512" and figure out what the hell to do with it:P
So one day I ported my app to Linux and quit worrying:)
There is an excuse to release crippled drivers: intellectual property. According to the bigwigs, there's some arcane magic in those 90mb software downloads that must not fall into the hands of their enemies. I highly doubt the validity of such claims, but what's far more likely is that pure open-source drivers would expose all the cheating that's been going on under the hood, tweaks that skew benchmark results for better reviews, or dumb hacks that mess with a card's performance or features for marketing purposes. NVidia has the Geforce and Quadro lines, which are pretty much identical except for the PCI IDs. Having an open-source driver means any twit with a text editor could "transform" their $99 Geforce 7300 into a $600 Quadro. That's not so bad, until the Quadro buyers find out and start aiming their lawyers at the company.
Fujitsu will go wherever the money is, and abandon everything else as dictated by business forecasts. They used to sell decent (cheap) desktop hard drives, but one day they just up-and-left that market. They "honored" warranties by replacing failed hard drives with a $40 cheque. Then everyone was afraid they'd do the same with their notebook drives, many people flocked to Seagate and Hitachi as a result. I certainly won't be surprised when they drop tablets and ultralights from their line-up once the other manufacturers show the slightest hint of competition, because competition equals price wars, and price wars aren't easy.
Only problem is the democrats don't have enough money to buy all the votes.
The United States were built through wars, not diplomacy. Why does anyone expect that to change now ? It's a young country whose only history involves fighting... fighting others, fighting itself... It takes a long time for a nation to stabilize and harmonize, the only reason the US is even on the map is because of their notoriety and a few long streaks of financial success, as well as some pretty serious tunnel-vision as evidenced by the complete ignorance of China's power until recently. Everything is still very much up in the air for the next few years and it all depends on how well the United States can perform as a whole nation, not just its simian leader.
Did anyone notice the guy posted on an adult board to begin with ? So in Hong Kong, theoretically speaking if you're in a sex shop and you point out one of your favorite DVDs to another customer, would they toss you in the slammer ?
What, you think you're the first person to compare political groups with organized crime rings ? The difference is that organized crime thrives because some of their products appeal to common social groups (drugs, gambling, etc). Politics only appeal to armchair crackpots and dewy-eyed do-gooders who have faith in any hierarchical organization. They both try to tell people how to run their lives, they both suck money out of the system, and they both have the means to shut people up rather permanently if they get in the way.
I'm not criticizing any of your points, as I've butted my head against them many times myself. My question however, is this:
Which graphics cards are the developers using ? We have all these frameworks and APIs for graphics acceleration, video capture, etc, and yet hardly anyone can use them with mainstream hardware. We can blame the manufacturers all day long, but who's to say the open-source "glue" is not the source of some of these problems ?
Here's my view, and I'm horribly outdated when it comes to driver development so bear with me here. What if we just let NVidia and ATI do their binary drivers, and instead of pressuring them into releasing crippled open-sourced versions, why not work WITH them to come up with an ABI layer that's suitable for both parties ? I don't give a damn about politics, I just want my $600 video card to work with X and decent 3D performance. Instead, I have a 2nd little "linux box" with pathetic hardware because anything newer/faster makes X blow cores. Clearly, we can't convince ATI/NVidia to release pure open-source drivers so maybe it's time to give up that doomed battle and try a new strategy.
There is already an easy fix against phishing, it's called human contact! With my bank, I have to call in and authorize certain types of bills/transfers the first time. Yeah, it's a pain but how often does the average person add payees to their account ? That way if someone gets a hold of my account numbers and security code, they can still only send money to recipients that are already registered. If they want to add their offshore account as a payee, they would have to call the bank, successfully impersonate me using all my personal info (dob, mother's name, etc.) and leave crumbs all over the telephone network. It doesn't make it 100% foolproof, but it certainly raises the bar to a level many scammers won't want to beat.
Technological solutions won't solve this human problem. People get fooled, people don't know any better. Making the system more complicated will only make the problem worse.
You are either brave or foolish. I also rely extensively on virtual instruments and sampling, writing pure virtual music software is how I started out in the 90's. Still, you can't go anywhere without getting blasted by audio hippies claiming "that's not real music!". The fact is, recording is the easy part! Multitracks and sequencers are to music what Windows Explorer is to files. They just move them around, cut/paste and a few simple tricks. There's very little computing involved.
I get quite irritated when people spend a small fortune on an "audio workstation" then use it like a glorified mixing deck. They'd be better off spending the cash on real gear, because it works in real-time, doesn't crash or become obsoleted by software upgrades, and the interface is a zillion times more natural. Instead there's a perverse market of Virtual Studio which ignores computing paradigms in order to faithfully reproduce a picture of a real mixer on-screen, and then you have to go out and buy a USB Control Surface that's basically a mixer with a USB port, to control the on-screen mixer. Yeah the mouse sucks, maybe they could have considered that if they had designed an actual computer interface.
What's next ? A virtual wah pedal that's operated by a real-looking USB wah-pedal-controller ?
I'd be baffled if Microsoft didn't let them do just that. Having an established franchise like GTA would be a strong driving force for hard drive sales. Sony did the same crap on the PS2 with Final Fantasy XI. The hardware doesn't sell itself, it's the software that drives everything!
Since when did Australia get annexed to the USA ? As a Canadian I'm a bit jealous (psych!)
I'm divided on this issue. For one, the accused is a lead member of what was one of the largest software pirate groups in the world, which is pretty crazy compared to the buddy-trading we used to do in the 80's and 90's:P He's probably responsible for some heavy-duty stuff in the world of copyright law. On the other hand, what the hell kind of pansy-ass government ships off their own criminal to the states ? If Australia wants to prosecute their citizen, go nuts! If they don't, then leave him be. That's probably why he lives there in the first place. The internet makes it easy to participate in global activities, but so does the telephone and snail mail.
I can't lie, I want to see this guy walk free, on principle. World leaders want to go on having their separate countries, distinct law systems and economic boundaries... well they have to go all the way! I don't think it's reasonable to open the borders whenever some high-ranking official deems it "necessary", but keep them closed for everything else. If Australia wants to be USA's sock puppet, they might as well become the 51st state and enjoy ALL the benefits of being part of the USA, including their foreign policy.
When you're a writer, the more often you use words the average american doesn't understand, the smarter it makes you look and the more pretentious your readers can sound at dinner when they impress all their inbred relatives with your big useless words. What's funny is this kind of behaviour is somewhat unique to the english language. You just don't see much of it in romance languages because they don't make words up out of thin air like modern multicultural english is forced to do.
Duuuuude... it's never been about economic sense. It's about how much more are you going to pay for that little extra gimmick that only 1% of all customers really want ? I think it would make economic sense for my $500 gaming-class video card to have 8 outputs, but in reality I would have to pay $800 for an special-purpose video card with a GPU from the dark ages in order to accomplish that. Sale price has very little to do with manufacturing cost.
Personally, I'm pissed off that there are still so few tablet PCs out there. I remember four years ago wanting one, but I couldn't justify the ridiculous price versus a plain old notebook. I mean, Dell doesn't even offer one yet. WTF is up with that ? Pardon me for not feeling comfortable throwing gobs of money at some tablet company I've never heard of, that will probably go up in smoke before the warranty ends.
In other news, Glenn Derene has been smoking record-breaking amounts of crack and writing ridiculous counter-evolutionary articles in a pathetic attempt to garner as much attention as the inimitable John C. Dvorak.
Home servers will not replace hosted apps. If that were true, I would have stopped using web apps before they were even invented because in an apartment with just my spouse and I (no kids), I've got 14 sets of lights blinking on my switch 24/7. I roll my eyes when people talk of server "closets", unless it's a friggin' walk-in closet bigger than the bathroom! And despite all the server gear I still find a use for globally-accessible hosted apps that I don't need to maintain myself, because I've got enough things to worry about already.
Top o'the mornin' laddy! We've got this crackpot idea that doesn't work in real-world scenarios, but you see, we're out of Guinness and me welfare checks be runnin' dry. How's about a nice research grant to refill me beer fridge ?
You beat me to it: Whenever your employer (or a client) makes you do something you don't agree to, Cover Your Ass. Document everything... phone calls, emails, dates, times. Then start looking for a job elsewhere if you can. You're better off taking a new job now, than having to explain yourself in an interview after the ship has sunk.
You hit the main reason why I've avoided Ajax frameworks so far: bloat. The latest Prototype.js is 94kb... that's about three to four times the size of my current pages (with images). Most people only use a teeny fraction of Prototype's functionality. I'd be happy if they could make it modular, e.g. one include for Ajax features, one for rounded corners, etc. That way you can pick and choose just what you need, and even concatenate them into a custom bundle to cut down on HTTP requests. Having one monolithic JS library just means every single page load slows down to a crawl. The download size isn't the main issue, because that gets cached/compressed, but the user's browser has to parse and initialize the library for each request.
Amen brother! I still wish our hospitals were more efficient, seems like a lot of waiting time is due to the bureaucracy, but it's one of many Canadian perks that have kept me from selling out to the more lucrative IT opportunities south of the border. I'm a relatively health guy, but the very thought of paying through the nose for basic healthcare is enough of a threat to make me want to stay home in chilly old Ontario.
512 bytes was good for floppy disks. I think we should have started upping the sector size around the same time as we hit the 528mb 1024-cylinder limit back in the early 90's. Considering that a modern hard drive has anywhere from one-half to two billion sectors, and that's some serious overhead for no reason. Error-correction is "easier" if it's spread over larger blocks. Why ? Because most files are quite large, and corrupting a 512 byte chunk is just as bad as corrupting a 4096 or 8192 byte chunk, because it's hosing the file either way. Might as well pool the ECC together and offer better protection for the large block, while still wasting less bits than the sum of all the small sectors' ECC. Even without the proposed ECC algorithm overhaul, larger blocks would allow more usable data per platter.
The downside is that we've had 512 byte sectors for so long, everyone's hardcoded the number in their apps and drivers. The biggest risk involved is to patch all that software... one little glitch could hose a ton of data.
How would Malder, Hemos and Cowboy Neal cope with the kind of person who won't even answer you unless addressed by his formal title I.e. "Dr. Doe", not "John" or "Doe". Worse yet "Mrs. Row" who will start an argument if called "Miss Row".
Simple. They'd fire the pompous ass, then hire Taco to TP their house:)
While that concept works great in other realms, the truth is Visa has no interest in reducing fraud. They profit from fraudulent transactions, and so do their customers. The ones who are hit hardest are the sellers, as not only do they have to pay ridiculous chargeback fees, they often lose the item they were selling.
Let's say you buy something off the net, then call a month later and declare the transaction as fraudulent.... IMMEDIATELY they yank the cash out of the merchant's account, send you a cute little form you have to sign and fax back, and a week later they refund your money. You get to keep the item because you have the benefit of the doubt, or to be more precise: Visa and MC treat all merchants as guilty by default.
One time I had a customer buy an item, a hard drive for example. Then once the card went through, he decided he wanted another one (twit). So I cut him a second invoice and charge the card again for the same amount. A month later I get a letter regarding the 2nd transaction being a "duplicate", that it had already been reversed and a hit filed on my record. It took another couple of weeks of me faxing serial numbers, signatures and ultimately sending video proof from my security cameras (with sound). I was just about ready to go reclaim the hard drive in person and rip the guy's head off. A month later a supposed review committee decided in my favor "in light of evidence provided".
Now I was providing physical products with a clear evidence of the transaction. I can only imagine how horrible the problem is for mail-order and online transactions. How can a merchant prove they sold something if they've never met the customer ?
I find it funny how a site like Cryptome can get shut down, while dozens of KKK, biker gang and neo-nazi hate sites go on with their merry business. That's one fucked up set of priorities they got there!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still waiting to be cast in an XXX Hackers spoof, where copying a garbage file sends the female lead on a dirty, dirty quest to get out of trouble with the sleazy fat ugly cops that pursue her.
Might as well spoof Takedown as well, where a fugitive hacker leads his asian arch nemesis on a cross-country chase through every brothel in the USA, all over a dick-length argument. They finally settle their feud in a stomach-churning scene where they both anally violate a journalist named John Warkoff.
Oh come on! When have you ever seen pr0n with a good story ?
Hey hey hey let's not go to war here... why don't we call them Provinces like they did up here in Canada ? The Province of England, Ahhhrg!
(raises hand) Guilty. I had my own Dos-clone OS and despite my diligence, I still managed to hard-code some values in a few rarely-used routines. Luckily they were read-only operations but it was certainly frustrating to chase down every occurrence of "512" and figure out what the hell to do with it :P
:)
So one day I ported my app to Linux and quit worrying
There is an excuse to release crippled drivers: intellectual property. According to the bigwigs, there's some arcane magic in those 90mb software downloads that must not fall into the hands of their enemies. I highly doubt the validity of such claims, but what's far more likely is that pure open-source drivers would expose all the cheating that's been going on under the hood, tweaks that skew benchmark results for better reviews, or dumb hacks that mess with a card's performance or features for marketing purposes. NVidia has the Geforce and Quadro lines, which are pretty much identical except for the PCI IDs. Having an open-source driver means any twit with a text editor could "transform" their $99 Geforce 7300 into a $600 Quadro. That's not so bad, until the Quadro buyers find out and start aiming their lawyers at the company.
Fujitsu will go wherever the money is, and abandon everything else as dictated by business forecasts. They used to sell decent (cheap) desktop hard drives, but one day they just up-and-left that market. They "honored" warranties by replacing failed hard drives with a $40 cheque. Then everyone was afraid they'd do the same with their notebook drives, many people flocked to Seagate and Hitachi as a result. I certainly won't be surprised when they drop tablets and ultralights from their line-up once the other manufacturers show the slightest hint of competition, because competition equals price wars, and price wars aren't easy.
Only problem is the democrats don't have enough money to buy all the votes.
The United States were built through wars, not diplomacy. Why does anyone expect that to change now ? It's a young country whose only history involves fighting... fighting others, fighting itself... It takes a long time for a nation to stabilize and harmonize, the only reason the US is even on the map is because of their notoriety and a few long streaks of financial success, as well as some pretty serious tunnel-vision as evidenced by the complete ignorance of China's power until recently. Everything is still very much up in the air for the next few years and it all depends on how well the United States can perform as a whole nation, not just its simian leader.
Did anyone notice the guy posted on an adult board to begin with ? So in Hong Kong, theoretically speaking if you're in a sex shop and you point out one of your favorite DVDs to another customer, would they toss you in the slammer ?
What, you think you're the first person to compare political groups with organized crime rings ? The difference is that organized crime thrives because some of their products appeal to common social groups (drugs, gambling, etc). Politics only appeal to armchair crackpots and dewy-eyed do-gooders who have faith in any hierarchical organization. They both try to tell people how to run their lives, they both suck money out of the system, and they both have the means to shut people up rather permanently if they get in the way.
I'm not criticizing any of your points, as I've butted my head against them many times myself. My question however, is this:
Which graphics cards are the developers using ? We have all these frameworks and APIs for graphics acceleration, video capture, etc, and yet hardly anyone can use them with mainstream hardware. We can blame the manufacturers all day long, but who's to say the open-source "glue" is not the source of some of these problems ?
Here's my view, and I'm horribly outdated when it comes to driver development so bear with me here. What if we just let NVidia and ATI do their binary drivers, and instead of pressuring them into releasing crippled open-sourced versions, why not work WITH them to come up with an ABI layer that's suitable for both parties ? I don't give a damn about politics, I just want my $600 video card to work with X and decent 3D performance. Instead, I have a 2nd little "linux box" with pathetic hardware because anything newer/faster makes X blow cores. Clearly, we can't convince ATI/NVidia to release pure open-source drivers so maybe it's time to give up that doomed battle and try a new strategy.
There is already an easy fix against phishing, it's called human contact! With my bank, I have to call in and authorize certain types of bills/transfers the first time. Yeah, it's a pain but how often does the average person add payees to their account ? That way if someone gets a hold of my account numbers and security code, they can still only send money to recipients that are already registered. If they want to add their offshore account as a payee, they would have to call the bank, successfully impersonate me using all my personal info (dob, mother's name, etc.) and leave crumbs all over the telephone network. It doesn't make it 100% foolproof, but it certainly raises the bar to a level many scammers won't want to beat.
Technological solutions won't solve this human problem. People get fooled, people don't know any better. Making the system more complicated will only make the problem worse.
You are either brave or foolish. I also rely extensively on virtual instruments and sampling, writing pure virtual music software is how I started out in the 90's. Still, you can't go anywhere without getting blasted by audio hippies claiming "that's not real music!". The fact is, recording is the easy part! Multitracks and sequencers are to music what Windows Explorer is to files. They just move them around, cut/paste and a few simple tricks. There's very little computing involved.
I get quite irritated when people spend a small fortune on an "audio workstation" then use it like a glorified mixing deck. They'd be better off spending the cash on real gear, because it works in real-time, doesn't crash or become obsoleted by software upgrades, and the interface is a zillion times more natural. Instead there's a perverse market of Virtual Studio which ignores computing paradigms in order to faithfully reproduce a picture of a real mixer on-screen, and then you have to go out and buy a USB Control Surface that's basically a mixer with a USB port, to control the on-screen mixer. Yeah the mouse sucks, maybe they could have considered that if they had designed an actual computer interface.
What's next ? A virtual wah pedal that's operated by a real-looking USB wah-pedal-controller ?
I'd be baffled if Microsoft didn't let them do just that. Having an established franchise like GTA would be a strong driving force for hard drive sales. Sony did the same crap on the PS2 with Final Fantasy XI. The hardware doesn't sell itself, it's the software that drives everything!
Since when did Australia get annexed to the USA ? As a Canadian I'm a bit jealous (psych!)
:P He's probably responsible for some heavy-duty stuff in the world of copyright law. On the other hand, what the hell kind of pansy-ass government ships off their own criminal to the states ? If Australia wants to prosecute their citizen, go nuts! If they don't, then leave him be. That's probably why he lives there in the first place. The internet makes it easy to participate in global activities, but so does the telephone and snail mail.
I'm divided on this issue. For one, the accused is a lead member of what was one of the largest software pirate groups in the world, which is pretty crazy compared to the buddy-trading we used to do in the 80's and 90's
I can't lie, I want to see this guy walk free, on principle. World leaders want to go on having their separate countries, distinct law systems and economic boundaries... well they have to go all the way! I don't think it's reasonable to open the borders whenever some high-ranking official deems it "necessary", but keep them closed for everything else. If Australia wants to be USA's sock puppet, they might as well become the 51st state and enjoy ALL the benefits of being part of the USA, including their foreign policy.
"G'day mate! I'm Canajun!"
When you're a writer, the more often you use words the average american doesn't understand, the smarter it makes you look and the more pretentious your readers can sound at dinner when they impress all their inbred relatives with your big useless words. What's funny is this kind of behaviour is somewhat unique to the english language. You just don't see much of it in romance languages because they don't make words up out of thin air like modern multicultural english is forced to do.
Duuuuude... it's never been about economic sense. It's about how much more are you going to pay for that little extra gimmick that only 1% of all customers really want ? I think it would make economic sense for my $500 gaming-class video card to have 8 outputs, but in reality I would have to pay $800 for an special-purpose video card with a GPU from the dark ages in order to accomplish that. Sale price has very little to do with manufacturing cost.
Personally, I'm pissed off that there are still so few tablet PCs out there. I remember four years ago wanting one, but I couldn't justify the ridiculous price versus a plain old notebook. I mean, Dell doesn't even offer one yet. WTF is up with that ? Pardon me for not feeling comfortable throwing gobs of money at some tablet company I've never heard of, that will probably go up in smoke before the warranty ends.
In other news, Glenn Derene has been smoking record-breaking amounts of crack and writing ridiculous counter-evolutionary articles in a pathetic attempt to garner as much attention as the inimitable John C. Dvorak.
Home servers will not replace hosted apps. If that were true, I would have stopped using web apps before they were even invented because in an apartment with just my spouse and I (no kids), I've got 14 sets of lights blinking on my switch 24/7. I roll my eyes when people talk of server "closets", unless it's a friggin' walk-in closet bigger than the bathroom! And despite all the server gear I still find a use for globally-accessible hosted apps that I don't need to maintain myself, because I've got enough things to worry about already.
Top o'the mornin' laddy! We've got this crackpot idea that doesn't work in real-world scenarios, but you see, we're out of Guinness and me welfare checks be runnin' dry. How's about a nice research grant to refill me beer fridge ?
Tally-ho!
"AAAARGH!! My SPIME!"
Invader Zim, best cartoon ever!
You beat me to it: Whenever your employer (or a client) makes you do something you don't agree to, Cover Your Ass. Document everything... phone calls, emails, dates, times. Then start looking for a job elsewhere if you can. You're better off taking a new job now, than having to explain yourself in an interview after the ship has sunk.
You hit the main reason why I've avoided Ajax frameworks so far: bloat. The latest Prototype.js is 94kb... that's about three to four times the size of my current pages (with images). Most people only use a teeny fraction of Prototype's functionality. I'd be happy if they could make it modular, e.g. one include for Ajax features, one for rounded corners, etc. That way you can pick and choose just what you need, and even concatenate them into a custom bundle to cut down on HTTP requests. Having one monolithic JS library just means every single page load slows down to a crawl. The download size isn't the main issue, because that gets cached/compressed, but the user's browser has to parse and initialize the library for each request.
Amen brother! I still wish our hospitals were more efficient, seems like a lot of waiting time is due to the bureaucracy, but it's one of many Canadian perks that have kept me from selling out to the more lucrative IT opportunities south of the border. I'm a relatively health guy, but the very thought of paying through the nose for basic healthcare is enough of a threat to make me want to stay home in chilly old Ontario.
It's about effing time!
512 bytes was good for floppy disks. I think we should have started upping the sector size around the same time as we hit the 528mb 1024-cylinder limit back in the early 90's. Considering that a modern hard drive has anywhere from one-half to two billion sectors, and that's some serious overhead for no reason. Error-correction is "easier" if it's spread over larger blocks. Why ? Because most files are quite large, and corrupting a 512 byte chunk is just as bad as corrupting a 4096 or 8192 byte chunk, because it's hosing the file either way. Might as well pool the ECC together and offer better protection for the large block, while still wasting less bits than the sum of all the small sectors' ECC. Even without the proposed ECC algorithm overhaul, larger blocks would allow more usable data per platter.
The downside is that we've had 512 byte sectors for so long, everyone's hardcoded the number in their apps and drivers. The biggest risk involved is to patch all that software... one little glitch could hose a ton of data.
How would Malder, Hemos and Cowboy Neal cope with the kind of person who won't even answer you unless addressed by his formal title I.e. "Dr. Doe", not "John" or "Doe". Worse yet "Mrs. Row" who will start an argument if called "Miss Row".
:)
Simple. They'd fire the pompous ass, then hire Taco to TP their house
While that concept works great in other realms, the truth is Visa has no interest in reducing fraud. They profit from fraudulent transactions, and so do their customers. The ones who are hit hardest are the sellers, as not only do they have to pay ridiculous chargeback fees, they often lose the item they were selling.
Let's say you buy something off the net, then call a month later and declare the transaction as fraudulent.... IMMEDIATELY they yank the cash out of the merchant's account, send you a cute little form you have to sign and fax back, and a week later they refund your money. You get to keep the item because you have the benefit of the doubt, or to be more precise: Visa and MC treat all merchants as guilty by default.
One time I had a customer buy an item, a hard drive for example. Then once the card went through, he decided he wanted another one (twit). So I cut him a second invoice and charge the card again for the same amount. A month later I get a letter regarding the 2nd transaction being a "duplicate", that it had already been reversed and a hit filed on my record. It took another couple of weeks of me faxing serial numbers, signatures and ultimately sending video proof from my security cameras (with sound). I was just about ready to go reclaim the hard drive in person and rip the guy's head off. A month later a supposed review committee decided in my favor "in light of evidence provided".
Now I was providing physical products with a clear evidence of the transaction. I can only imagine how horrible the problem is for mail-order and online transactions. How can a merchant prove they sold something if they've never met the customer ?
I find it funny how a site like Cryptome can get shut down, while dozens of KKK, biker gang and neo-nazi hate sites go on with their merry business. That's one fucked up set of priorities they got there!